That’s why we have Lucky Patcher :)
Aside from being unethical to withdraw a developer’s income from a good app, it can also break the operation and even cause an account ban. It is one thing to avoid ads and annoying pop-ups, which is legitimate and easy with the aforementioned Blokada or another DNS blocker, and another to hack an paid app or game.
Apart from the Tech review
4 different antivirus engines on virustotal flags the app. So, the app definitely has malicious files which can raise serious security concerns. The app also needs root access to work at its full potential, so by granting the root access, we allow the app to modify system files.
And Google also know the download of this app, Blacklight Report of the Lucky Patcher site
Blacklight detected this website sending user data to Alphabet, the technology conglomerate that encompasses Google and associated companies like Nest. The Silicon Valley giant collects data from twice the number of websites as its closest competitor, Facebook. An Alphabet spokesperson told The Markup that internet users can go here if they want to opt out of the company showing them targeted ads based on their browsing history.
The site sent information to the following domains google-analytics.com, googletagmanager.com.
Vvery careful with this in an OS full controlled by Google.
I would argue it’s unethical of them to force their obnoxious ads on people and that they’re not losing any revenue because the person that would patch an app to remove said annoyances would also be likely to just uninstall it if they were unable to patch it.
Ads are certainly not ethical at all, especially if you are in a waiting room, office and so as not to want to disturb, you turn off the sound of the game, with which you are spending time, but nevertheless an ad at full volume jumps in the middle , already independent of the annoyances with these banners and pop-ups. This should go to hell. But I do not find at all legitimate that a dev with many hours of work makes a nice and useful app and wants for this a few Euros to have some income from his work and a user hacks this app to save these few euros. Against annoying advertising companies anything goes, but with the work of others you should not get involved.
Damn. Didn’t knew all of that, thanks for the information!
I don’t modify the apk of any app, just the ones that I know certain features aren’t necessary and I know that the devs aren’t being hurt if I’m doing it (i.e. big tech apps). And I am careful of which apps I modify, if there’s probably checking for unauthorized modifications or if certain modifications will break the app altogether.
Since there’s all these spooky stuff about Lucky Patcher, I did try out Blokada, and I found it very nice! Only thing that didn’t work out for me was that it still doesn’t substitutes Lucky Patcher, since I used it mainly for modifying other in-app features (nothing unethical lol). And the fact that Blokada has to run on the background while in use, when I could just modify one thing and reinstall the apk and never bother to keep Lucky Patcher open.
Could you perhaps recommend me other FOSS app which modifies an app’s internal features just like Lucky Patcher?
None of these type of apps are FOSS, nor it is Lucky Patcher, all are proprietary soft freeware https://alternativeto.net/software/lucky-patcher/
Same functions - same problem
See the description in Google Play if the shows ads or sellings in the apps, because Google put this in the description and use which don’t. Or Use FOSS apps from F-Droid, there are also nice games, f.Exmpl. The Gloomy Dungeons serie, a first person dungeon crawler RPG. and other very usefull apps, all of them FOSS also some paid OSS, like VPNs and similar, the good ones are never free, because good servers cost money.
Thanks for the recommendations and advice! Even though I still don’t have an actual good substitute to Lucky Patcher :(
And I fortunately already knew about the ads use in app description on Google Play and F-Droid (almost exclusively using it and ditching Google Play now!), I’m happy to be able to say that little by little I’m detaching from proprietary software on everything I can!
And I will try harder to look for apps with no ads rather than with from now on. Again, thanks!
For almost 20 years I have not needed to pay for a software or game, neither on the PC nor on the mobile, none of the apps and games that I have on my mobile currently have ads, although not all of them are OSS. That is, it can be achieved by searching a bit, the AlternativeTo page is an excellent help here.
This is why we have ad-blockers. And for the games that have embedded/offline ads, those get patched, and if that falls then uninstalled. 😛
I’d totally be willing to see ads if that could make console games cheaper. Those are still way overpriced, even if there is a demo you can test before you buy, it’s too much of a commitment and only encourages piracy
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